Difference or Disagreement

In everyday speech, we often use "difference" and "disagreement"  interchangeably.  This practice is mostly harmless, but not entirely.  It can obscure an important insight: not every difference is disagreement.  I may think that sautéed onions are delicious, and you may think otherwise.  Yes, a difference of opinion, but not necessarily anything to disagree over.  This insight should caution against assuming that difference by itself produces disagreement. 

Roughly speaking, difference is what separates things.  The dissimilarities that distinguish this from that must matter to some degree or else we wouldn’t notice them.  Race is a distinction that shouldn’t matter.  Nevertheless, it has played a catastrophic role throughout much of our country's history.  When racial differences are intertwined with other differences—economic, cultural, social—they become politicized as disagreement. 

The founders of our Constitution called groups that formed around disagreement factions.  Democracies needed to find ways to limit the violence that majority factions would impose on others—the tyranny of the majority.  Their solution was to make disagreeing safe.  They tried to do this by both empowering and impeding majority rule within an institutional framework of checks and balances and a set of enumerated rights. 

The need to disagree safely goes to the heart of what a political community must be—a collective of people who, because they share a common fate, must disagree safely about what that fate should be.  Although civility is important, disagreeing safely does not mean disagreeing politely.  It means, instead, not demeaning an adversary’s dignity, not threatening their livelihood, and not treating them disrespectfully, even if important decisions are at stake.  Political communities survive divisive disagreements by not harming their political foes.

Of course, fostering dignity, safeguarding livelihoods, and encouraging respect are easier said than done.  In real life, they require painful tradeoffs.  Because politics is a form of negotiation, we often start by demanding maximalist goals before settling for what is possible.  However, nothing is possible when politics becomes polarized.  We need a different political orientation to deal with paralyzing polarization.  What if we asked not what we would settle for, but instead what we would bear for the sake of the common good?  This shift in focus alone would radically reorient the way we do politics.